On Authenticity

Why you should write something they'll hate.

This piece is kind of a corollary to something titled Don't Give Them What They Want, which I posted back in November. But where that piece was dealing with external forces; the dangers of paying heed to what the film and TV market thinks it wants, this one is internal. I'm interested here in exploring our own narrative compass, and how it can swing between the stories we want to tell and the stories we think we ought to tell.

David Lynch: Never anything other than wholly authentic.

I'm sixty pages into a new screenplay, and it's not working. The problem isn't obvious, at least it's not obvious to me. The story makes sense, the structure is pretty much as it should be, the characters are motivated and there's conflict etc etc. This thing is ticking all the boxes, but it just isn't working. I can tell it isn't working because each day I open the file with a feeling of despondency. I'm grinding this thing, just trying to get some more pages done. It's not fun, I'm not enjoying it. And if I'm not enjoying writing it, why the hell would anyone enjoy reading it?

So I go back to page one and read what I have. Each scene and sequence is fine, some of them are even good, but by the time I'm done reading, a torpor has set in again. Something is definitely wrong.

I open one of the gazillion books on screenwriting that sits on the shelf behind my desk. No one of these books is entirely useful, but I don't know everything there is to know about screenwriting and, even though some of these authors have sold far fewer scripts than I have (if any at all, in some cases), each one will at some point have landed on a scrap of wisdom that might prove useful. I scan for stuff about pace and conflict, I browse sections on structure. Some of it is reassuring, some of it makes me think that I have got the whole thing wrong from page one. No obvious solution leaps out at me.

I am not panicking and I am not abandoning ship just yet. This has happened before and, in the back of my mind, I know why. I might just need to take a beat to allow the thought to come all the way to the front of my mind, to admit to myself the murky truth of the real problem.

The problem is authenticity.

If you're a working screenwriter, or even an aspiring screenwriter, you have absorbed a lot of conventional wisdom about this craft. Whether that came from watching movies, or reading scripts, or reading books about writing, or getting feedback from producers and development people (almost certainly it is an amalgam of all of these things), there is some nebulous idea in your head of what a script should be. Of what "they" want, whether they be the audience or their pseudo-surrogate, the industry gate-keeper. But you're a free-thinking intelligent human being, and fully paid-up member of the audience yourself, and you know better than to be dictated to by formulas and structures and whatever passes as conventional wisdom at any given time. Except...

Except we all want to please. We all want the slap on the back and to hear "this script is great". And we imagine there are well-charted waters that will lead us to this safe harbour in the land of the "dependable" and well-remunerated screenwriter. And so, consciously (in the case of the neophyte) and less consciously (in the case of those with more experience) we craft our stories to more or less a given formula, whether that be the basic 3-Act structure or something more arcane and complicated. We're trying to deliver something exciting without causing alarm.

But sometimes the exciting doesn't fit into the prescribed package. Sometimes it has sharp corners and odd angles and so we find ourselves mangling it into the required shape. And that, I belatedly realise, is what has happened here. What I've got on my screen ticks all the boxes of what a script should be... It's just a bit shit.

The battle that I think is raging here (raging is strong, but a battle that just quietly gets on with itself in the background is less dramatic) is between what is required and what is authentic. Am I delivering up something that is "mine" or am I tailoring it to be what I imagine "they" want? And that is not the same as suggesting that what "they" want is somehow wrong, it just might be wrong for this story. And equally, I might be wrong about what "they" want, because "they" probably would rather have something good than something "correct".

Where this battle gets fiercest (I'm not letting go of this ill-suited battle analogy any time soon) is when we as writers are verging on desperation. Maybe we haven't sold something or been commissioned in a while, maybe we are coming off a run of bad luck, maybe we are starting out and want to impress. Or maybe, and I have been in this situation a couple of times, we are writing something for someone IMPORTANT - a movie star, a big director - and we want them to love the work. In all of these instances, the need to somehow conform becomes overwhelming. Now is not the time to get avant-garde and throw away structure; now is the time to show that we can be good, obedient little writers.

But, again, these people would rather it was good than conformist - if nothing else, they flatter themselves that they can make the good conform.

If I look back over my career, my biggest successes have been when I have told the story how it wants to be told with no heed to any of the accepted strictures of screenwriting - I've messed with timelines, with structure, even with the formatting of the pages themselves. Every time I have let the story come out how it wanted to, it has gone somewhere and achieved something. I have had some success toeing the line, but it has generally been moderate and I haven't had much fun doing it.

And yet, still I fight against my instincts. Sixty pages into this script and I can now see that what is wrong with it is that I have attempted the square-peg-round-hole trick; in an attempt to take a weird idea and make it palatable, I have tried to package the weird idea as something un-weird. But it's a weird idea, a weird idea that I would LOVE to watch as a movie. So why am I soft-peddling that? The whole thing needs to be balls-out weird. Very probably that will turn off a lot of people, but the few who like it will really like it. What would David Lynch do?

Movie structure is all well and good and sometimes it is a perfect fit. But more often than not, the structure gets in the way of the story. I have read a lot of scripts in my life where all the right things happened in all the right places but no one cared.

And so maybe we abandon, for this exercise at least, the shelf where the screenplay manuals live and turn instead to the shelves on the other side of the room; the ones that contain the novels.

Novelists (forgive me if you're a novelist who disagrees with this) seem not to give much of a shit about story structure. On my shelves right now I see Rachel Cusk, David Mitchell, Mark Danielewski... Even more mainstream authors think little of introducing a character, then jumping back in time in the next chapter to fill in some relevant detail, then jumping sideways to bring in a new person etc etc. There's no reason why a movie can't do this (plenty of movies already do). There's no reason why a movie HAS to start with the status quo, then introduce a complication, then have a debate, then cross some stupid threshold…

I'm not throwing the baby out with the bathwater; stories work how they work and we like to see a beginning, a middle, and an end, and we like our hero to overcome some obstacles etc etc. But that doesn't mean that we HAVE to set up the world in the first few pages, that we HAVE to introduce a catalyst on page 15 or we HAVE to have them make their decision to act by page 25. If that can happen organically, and happens to fit the template, then great. But it's more important that it happens well and believably, and with a little bit of verve and atmosphere, than that we cut out the good stuff because we need to hit those markers.

Authenticity is telling your story the way you want to tell it, the way you would enjoy seeing it unfold. Anticipating what someone else might like is the opposite thing. But being authentic always feels courageous, and there are times for all of us where courage deserts us. Or at least times, like this one, where we realise we got scared somewhere along the way and have been unconsciously playing it safe, to the detriment of the story.

It's really easy to be authentic when it doesn't matter; when there aren't bills to pay, when it doesn't matter if this thing ever gets made or published. It's much harder when you feel external pressure and your instinct is to conform to a perceived expectation, to not rock the boat. But it's at precisely these times that authenticity is the best weapon in your arsenal - if this thing you're working on matters, for whatever reason, then knock their socks off with it.

Write something that everyone is going to hate. I bet you fail.